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FSG's Work in Progress blog has asked six Farrar, Straus, and Giroux authors—Frank Bidart, Nicola Griffith, Jesse Bering, Maureen McLane, Carle Phillips, and Chris Adrian—"what books spoke to them when they were coming out." The answers are fantastic, and so is the Frank Bidart poem "Queer," printed here in full. (Related: Bidart, whose author photo was apparently taken by James Franco, is reviewed at Bookforum.com here.)

The news that Lonely Planet is laying off more than a third of its editorial staff has led to a sad but kind of cool new Twitter hashtag, #lpmemories. Current and former staffers have been chiming in with recollections of their time at the guidebook company, which range from one writer reminiscing about riding an “auto-rickshaw in Kathmandu to deliver travel guide ms to FedEx, delayed by goat sacrifice on airport runway” to another who remembers “swigging champagne in an Orissa jungle hut with Russian backpackers while elephants trumpeted outside.”

The Guardian is now accepting submissions for the second annual Not the Booker Prize. The rules are simple: they’re after “the most vibrant, the most compelling, the most surprising full-length novels written by Commonwealth citizens and scheduled for publication between 1 October 2012 and 30 September 2013—so no Americans, no poets and no arguing.”

Norman Mailer’s former home in Provincetown, MA, is up for sale for $3.9 million. For the past six years, the red-brick house (which boasts the author’s study and basement boxing gym) has been home to the Norman Mailer Center, but that arangement ended earlier this year, when the organization was unable to come up with the cash to purchase the house.

ICANN, the organization responsible for allocating internet domain names, has decreed that Amazon will not be getting the .amazon suffix after protests in South America.

“Animal Lovers United,” “Misguided Social Media Marketers,” “Those Who Want to Talk About Movies,” and “Those Who Want to Complain About Stuff”: LitReactor assembles a guide to “the strangest and most unexpected Goodreads groups.”